... to Electrical Science [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959, p. 70). 40. P. E. Viemeister, The Lightning Book (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 137. 41. A. W. Graubau, Principles of Stratigraphy, vol. 1 (A. G. Seiler, 1924; New York: Dover, 1960), p. 72. 42. Apollo Lunar Geology Investigation Team, "Geologic Setting of the Apollo 15 Samples," Science 175 (28 January 1972 ... moon any kind of history for the last three billion years, it seems reasonable to look to other kinds of evidence in an effort to determine the age of the crater Aristarchus. And of these other kinds of evidence, we have already noted the appearance, the stratigraphic relationships, the intense radioactivity, and the luminous emissions from this site. Everything that is known about this crater argues in favor of its youth. It would be an exercise in futility at this time to attempt to pin down the exact moment when Aristarchus first ...

... in the archaeological records, we have actually only one instance in which a fragment of a small adult skull was definitely found in the stratum of Phase IIg. Schliemann mentions the skeletons of 'two warriors' with bronze helmets, found in the burnt layer; but the stratigraphic position is not certified, and the helmets later turned out to be fragments of a bronze vessel. One might therefore conclude that the occupants of the town escaped. On the other hand, if an invading army took the city it would surely have thoroughly looted ... a grand scale is another word for general catastrophe: What force can roil up the mantle and wrench around so much of the crust of the Earth at a single time?... to be continued. REFERENCES 1. Claude F. A. Schaeffer, Stratigraphie comparee et chronologie de I'Asie Occidentale (London: Oxford U Press, 1948), p.7. 2. J.W. Mavor, Jr. summarizes the work of Marinatos and Galanopoulos in "A Mighty Bronze Age Volcanic Explosion," XII Oceanus (Woods Hole, ...

... fair to point out that we are in agreement on the relative, not the absolute, chronology; yet Schaeffer concedes to me that some limited reduction of historical dates may be due a view to which today more than one scholar tends. (1) Examining the stratigraphical evidence, Schaeffer did not investigate literary sources that refer to the very same catastrophes; but a natural upheaval that took place in a historical period in a country of advanced culture could not but leave a memory in historical documents. Thus Schaeffer stopped short of drawing ... evidence of a great natural upheaval in the area of the Near East was diligently performed by Claude F. A. Schaeffer of the College de France, the excavator of Ras Shamra-Ugarit. During the years of World War II and the years following he labored on his Stratigraphie comparee et chronologie de l ? Asie occidentale. Working independently of me he came to the conclusion that great catastrophes of continental dimensions closed several historical ages; the greatest of them took place at the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt and actually caused its downfall ...

... B.C. (10), with the bulk of the scholarly world in general agreement, a major error in chronological attribution may have been made. The sheer repetition and perpetuation of the above dating may also have played a role in reinforcing a possible illusory authenticity. Stratigraphical evidence resulting from site excavation in depth has proven to be a major tool for the archaeologist in establishing a system of comparative chronology. The system is however, not without its pitfalls (11). First, there is the problem of establishing a relative ( ... of Furumark (19) has further solidified the absolute chronology of the pottery categories, but again this was based upon "chiefly the synchronisms that can be established by comparison and correlation of Mycenaean objects found in datable Egyptian contexts and of Egyptian objects recovered in observed Mycenaean stratigraphic associations (20)." As far back as 1897 Tsountas (21) warned scholars not to ignore "the unsettled state of Egyptian chronology" when enlisting the aid of Egyptology in dating Mycenaean products. And as recently as 1960 Cook (22) again ...

... the cosmos has undergone. THE MEANING OF GEOLOGICAL BOUNDARIES Of all the evidence for catastrophically sudden events in the history of our planet, none, it seems to me, is less deservedly ignored- by catastrophists themselves as well as by uniformitarians- than that of geological stratigraphy. The very existence of such universally accepted geochronological terms as era and period (or of such petrological terms as formation and bed or such paleontological terms as zone and assemblage) clearly implies unconformities in the Earth's crust. If the Earth's history were composed solely of ... of human embeddedness in nature. [* Cf. Ramses II and His Time (N.Y. 1978). pp. 4344.- The Ed.LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE OF PROTOHISTORIC EVENTS In the task of reconstructing the protohistoric past, linguistic evidence is intrinsically less weighty than stratigraphic evidence, not only because words can constitute maps without territories but also because their significance depends almost wholly on interpretation. Because of this hermeneutic relativity, verbal evidence can rarely if ever be reliably said to "speak for itself". In many cases, the ...

... catastrophic climates. The "ice ages," for instance, may have been a period of combined ice and stone deluges from outer space, explaining thereby a number of inconsistencies in the terrestrial pure theory of a central focus and outspreading therefrom. The absence of fall-out stratigraphic formations in older rock formations bespeaks a primeval peace. A question arises as to what constitutes outer space or exoterrestrialism for dust and stone falls. Under certain conditions of large meteoroid or cometary impact, and heavy multiple volcanism, exploded material can achieve extreme heights and ... N. Baker of the University of Delaware, with D. Storzer and G. A. Wagner of the Max Planck Institute of Heidelberg, studied intensively the Caribbean-North American strewnfield [19. They estimated the total tektite field at 10 17 grams of material, dated stratigraphically at Middle Upper Eocene. Some 6000 such glass microspherules were found in the sediment of one thin core at a depth of some 250 centimeters below the Caribbean Sea Bottom. The falls apparently came either at different times, or from different phases or portions of a ...